(Zack Giallongo is the artist of The Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents Macbeth, and its sequel, The Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents Romeo and Juliet.)

What was the last book you read?

I haven’t finished it yet, but I love the title (and the book so far). But I’m reading The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill. It’s about the Minotaur, who has survived to modern times, working at a barbecue restaurant outside of Atlanta.

What food goes perfectly with your novel?

You could go one of two ways with this. For SZMRP:Macbeth, I suggest tacos. Or, if you want to go very authentic, Scottish haggis. However, I actually love both of these things, and I’m thinking a little fusion cuisine of a haggis taco would be a great thing to put in your face.

What’s your favorite word?

“Callipygian.” I like the rhythm and the way it rolls off the tongue. It’s also funny. It means “having a shapely buttocks.”

What literary character should your readers use as a basis for their mental picture of you?

Rooster Cogburn from True Grit by Charles Portis. Anyone who’s met me knows that we share many of the same traits: a beard, an eyepatch. Also, I am so way tough. I could totally be a U.S. Marshall with my level of toughness!

What literary character is your favorite Halloween costume?

One year I dressed as Grendel using a series of bath mats. I don’t remember if I won or not. . . .

The Ultimate Doonesbury.Doonesbury was really my first graphic obsession. Everything about it is great. It’s smart, funny, and Trudeau always manages to find a unique angle on any subject. And despite Dave Sim’s wild claims for Cerebus the Aardvark, Doonesbury has been following the same characters for 45 years, making it the longest running narrative in history.

What’s your favorite word?

Petrichor. Defined as “the smell of soil that comes with the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather.” It’s one of those words that we would normally say, “the Germans would have a word for that.” It’s so evocative. Plus, I live in California, and this drought is so frightening that any hint of moisture in the air sparks wild celebrations.

What literary character should your readers use as a basis for their mental picture of you?

Ichabod Crane. I’m skinny and slightly stooped (note to self: must work on posture). Plus, I have to confess that I am a bit scared of the idea of a headless horseman hunting me down on my commute home from work.

You have one chance to convert someone into a book lover. What book do you give them?

Instead of book, I’ll say “graphic novel.” And I would (and do) give them Persepolis. The art is beautiful, the story is simple, the voice and the setting are unique. Last I checked, that’s what most people are looking for when they open a book.

What would a reading tree house designed just for you look like?

It would be inside of a hollow tree and the pages of the pages of the books would still be connected to the tree, and still alive. I’m not sure it would be practical, but it sounds really “groovy.”

(Ian Lendler is the author of The Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents Macbeth and its sequel, The Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents Romeo and Juliet, which comes out next fall.)

We get lots of comics in the mail here at First Second. And we get lots of them handed to us at shows.

They’re from other publishers as a ‘look what we’re doing!,’ by authors and illustrators who’d like to work with us in the future, by agents who want us to get a sense of their clients, by international publishers who are hoping we’ll publish their books in the US, by educators and librarians and booksellers who want us to know what they’re seeing in the market, etc. Lots of comics. Lots and lots and lots of comics. Graphic novels and issue comics and trade paperbacks and mini-comics and art books and all sorts of book-shaped things.

What happens to all of them?

First Second’s offices are in New York City. As such, they’re pretty small. I mean, they’re reasonably sized! We all have a desk and walls and stuff! But there’s not really extra room to store books and books and books and books.

We do have two bookshelves where we keep our ‘library’ — books by authors that we’re interested in working with in the future, books that do something with storytelling, color, style, format, size, shape, that we’re interested in emulating sometime — books that we absolutely need to do our jobs properly.

With the building that we work in, there’s not space for anything else, unfortunately.

So what happens when these books show up at our office?

We have two staff meetings every week; when books show up, we bring them to the meetings, and they get passed around to anyone in the office who wants to read them. We read them and talk about anything that seems interesting. If it’s a person we want to watch, or the book does something sufficiently interesting that we need to keep it around for reference, it gets jammed into our ‘library’ bookshelves.

If not, it goes on the general ‘To Donate’ shelves outside the kitchen, where the rest of the people in the Macmillan offices can come by, browse, and take books for their own reading purposes.

After a few months of circulation, those books get boxed up and donated to Housing Works, one of our local nonprofit bookstores — all their proceeds to go fight AIDS.

We’re not the biggest fans of throwing away books. At the same time, our office literally isn’t big enough to hold all the books we get without exploding in some terrible way. We feel that donating them to a good book-related charity is the best option for them — an excellent middle ground.

We love getting books sent to us! We really appreciate getting the chance to read other peoples work — and all this great work deserves to have another life and find more readers, since we don’t have space to keep it ourselves.

(I note that this is a really, really specific set of instructions that will definitely help you out with requesting any First Second requests; possibly not so much with other publishers, depending on their own policies.)

“I love to read.”

First Second uses Netgalley — they’re a galley service that lets people request advance digital copies of our graphic novels (and other peoples’ graphic novels and prose books). People typically request copies because they’re reviewers, and they need the advance copy of the book to write a review from, or because they’re teachers or librarians or booksellers, and they need to read the advance copy to figure out how many books to buy for their classroom or library or bookstore.

We think Netgalley is great! If you’re a teacher/librarian/bookseller/reviewer, and you don’t hate digital books, you should definitely head over there and check out what they’re offering (including some excellent upcoming graphic novels from First Second).

When a teacher/librarian/bookseller/reviewer etc. requests a title from a publisher via Netgalley, that publisher has to go through by hand and approve each request. What that means is, if you’re a reviewer and you’re like, ‘I wish to read this book!’ and you request it via Netgalley, someone in the publishing staff has to go into the Netgalley system and say, ‘yes, this person really should get this book; I’m hitting the OKAY button now’ for every single request that they get.

A lot of the time, this is a really easy decision! If you’re a bookseller who’s a member of the ABA, a librarian who’s a member of the ALA, someone who the publishing staff person knows professionally, the answer is obviously yes. Yes, you can have as many books as you’d like!

But sometimes, it’s a much harder decision. There are lots of people who request books through First Second’s Netgalley account who I don’t personally know.

What a publisher does then is to look at a person’s profile. Everyone who joins Netgalley has to put together a quick profile; it’s basically something that has a person’s name and their description of why they should be given books. ‘I’m getting my MLS now!’ or ‘I’m on the teen selection group at my local bookstore!’ or ‘I have a blog that has 2,5000 followers!’

“I love to read!” is something that sometimes (moderately often) pops up as the single sentence (or the leading sentence) in a review copy request.

This isn’t the best statement to lead with if you’re trying to convince a publisher to give you a digital galley.

Netgalley is a site which is primarily used to get advance copies of books to industry figures so that they can take some action that will sell copies of a book when it comes out (like, writing a review that encourages people to buy books! Or buying copies for their library or bookstore!). The point of Netgalley is not for non-industry professional readers to be able to read advance copies of books they’re excited about.

We’re really glad that people on Netgalley love to read. We love to read ourselves! We feel that everyone should love to read, and that that would make the world a better place.

But as a publisher, we’re actually putting our books up on Netgalley so that they get in the hands of people who specifically have a career in loving to read — people who have become booksellers or librarians or teachers, and who are in a position to affect the sales numbers of a book.

That’s why we recommend that any Netgalley profiles should be constructed around the thesis that there’s something you can bring to the book that can potentially help its sales. And even if you’re not a member of the American Library Association (or something similarly official), there are lots of things you could already be doing that signal to a publisher that you are the kind of person who has the power to convince others to buy copies of a book.

Are you a blogger? Do you review for Amazon VINE? Do you write for your school or local newspaper or literary magazine? Are you part of a book club? Do you volunteer at your local library? Do you have a book-related twitter, Facebook, tumblr, youtube or instagram account? Do you pick up the occasional shift for your local bookstore? Do you belong to an organization like SCBWI or PEN?

Those are all things that should be included in your Netgalley profile, and which will encourage publishers to think, ‘THIS is the kind of person I want to have reading our advance digital galleys.’

Any other information — religion, marital status, professional degrees, non-book-related careers you’ve had — don’t need to be included in your profile. Even book-related information like the age you were when you first learned how to read, whether or not you read to your children, how big your book collection is, etc. — aren’t necessary. Including not-as-relevant things like that may just distract a publisher from the fact that you are in fact a person who should be given an advance review copy of their book — especially if they’re getting 50+ review copy requests via Netgalley every day that they then have to go through one by one.

Not all books that First Second graphic novels are the same dimensions, have the same color palette and use the same paper stock. We do have a few sizes that are more or less ‘standard’ for our books, the truth is that the books we publish are a number of different shapes and sizes.

Our two ‘standard’ sizes here at First Second are 6 x 8 1/2 and 7 1/2 x 10. Here are two books in these sizes — The Wrenchies and The Unsinkable Walker Bean. Generally, the larger size is for younger titles, while the smaller size is for teen and adult books. Both of them are trade paperbacks, rather than hardcovers.

We choose these two sizes to work well within the book market — so that they could fit on the shelves at schools, libraries, and bookstores. We also want them to create a reading experience similar to reading a novel — in that they should physically feel just like ‘regular books’ (ie, prose books) for readers — and parents of readers! — who are just getting into graphic novels.

But we also publish a lot of books in other sizes as well!

Big books! Small books! Sideways books! Hardcover and paperback books! Books with and without flaps! Books in boxes! Etc.

Why so many sizes, given my previous statements about standardization and echoing the book market?

Well, it turns out that all books are different! And sometimes, that means what’s going to work best for the book is to publish it in a different size than our usual.

This is something that’s come up when talking about one of our recent graphic novels, The Rise of Aurora West, by Paul Pope, JT Petty, and David Rubin.

Last year, we published Paul Pope’s graphic novel Battling Boy, in our standard 6 x 8 1/2 trim size. It’s a sci-fi adventure book for kids ages 10 and up; we thought that this size was good for children that young (it fits in their hands as well as on their bookshelves!) that’s still big enough to show off how gorgeous Paul’s artwork is.

This year, we published The Rise of Aurora West in a smaller trim size — 5 x 7 1/2 — and in black and white.

Why the difference in sizes?

The two books are set in the same universe, but they’re pretty different! The Rise of Aurora West is a book for young adults, featuring a teen character with a coming-of-age story. It’s also a noir mystery, and it’s drawn by a different artist, David Rubin.

To play on those differences (and to make it clear that there were differences between the two titles), we decided to change the format of the book itself.

We think both books look pretty great! And we hope you do, too.

Our number one priority when we publish a book is to publish it as well as we can, and part of that, for us, means choosing a format that we think best fits the material, while at the same making the book accessible to the ultimate audience: the readers.

One of the freshest, loveliest children’s comics I’ve come across this year is from Oni Press. In a format akin to Luke Pearson’s HILDA books—also beloved of my own children—COSTUME QUEST is pure reading pleasure. There’s a joy and clarity to the storytelling in every aspect that makes this little universe a rare treat. Funny enough, it’s tied in with a video game. Makes me want to give it a try. But more than that, I hope more books are coming. First rate.

Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang’s new graphic novel In Real Life comes out today!

We’re big admirers of Cory’s work, and Jen’s debut graphic novel Koko Be Good was so wonderful that we were thrilled to get the chance to pair them together on a great story about this world and the world of the internet.

In Real Life tells a story with two sides — digital and real life. But what it makes absolutely clear is that our digital lives — not only gaming, but also just making friends and meeting people online — have a real effect on peoples’ lives outside of the internet. People may still say that anything done online is not ‘real life,’ but those boundaries are becoming so blurred that it’s harder and harder to distinguish what makes things count for people as ‘real.’ The relationships, emotions, and interactions people engage with online can be more significant than anything that happens in the more-physical world.

Anda, the main character of In Real Life, is able to make friends, find confidence, and learn how to relate to people better when she’s online.

But she’s also able to change peoples’ lives — and the way that they think about money and exploitation — with the power of the internet, and the friends she’s met and the skills she’s learned online. You can’t say that’s not a ‘real life’ effect!

Jen’s art in this book is absolutely fantastic; the way that she depicts movement and dynamism is unique. This book is just gorgeous! Even if you aren’t interested in video games or economics, you should check In Real Life out just for the art.

Panel – with Danica Novgorodoff
The Mary Sue Presents – Fight What You Know
Time: 2:15 PM – 3:00 PM
Location: Room 1A14
Description: The geek world needs better representation in media, but aren’t you supposed to write what you know? Truth is, the whole “write what you know” thing is a load of bull honkey. A writer who can’t appreciate the perspectives of others is no kind of writer at all. Writers from all backgrounds and experiences join to talk about research, listening, soliciting criticism, and how to make sure you’re writing well when you’re outside the comfort zone of your own perspective.

PanelCreate Your Own Monster – with Andrew Arnold, Ben Hatke, and George O’Connor
Time: 10:30am – 11:30am
Location: Family HQ – 1C03
Details: Three authors enter…and with your help, they’ll each create a monster who embodies everything that you think monsters should be! Which will be best? It’s up to you!
Moderator: Jack Baur

Panel – with Cory Doctorow
Breaking Good
Time: 7:15 – 8:00pm
Location: 1A05
Description: This panel explores how comic books, video games, and novels are addressing world challenges. Perhaps the most inspiring content for our panel audience will be to hear about how you are using popular entertainment to address the issues that you care about. We’ll have about 10 minutes each to talk. It’s an exciting lineup of panelists which includes an FBI Victim Specialist, the dynamic Alexis Krieger, who was involved in creating the comic book Abolitionista! that is being used to empower young people to protect themselves from predators.

Sunday – October 12th

Panel – with Zack Giallongo and Ben Hatke
Create Your Own Magical Creature
Time: 10:00am – 11:00am
Location: Family HQ – 1C03
Description: Two authors enter…and with your help, they’ll each create a magical creature who embodies everything that you think is awesome! Which will be best? It’s up to you!

Panel – with Zack Giallongo, Ben Hatke, and George O’Connor
Build Your Own Adventure
Time: 3:15 – 4:00pm
Location: 1A01
Description: In this interactive panel perfect for kids and families, top-tier graphic novel and comic authors and illustrators will work with the audience to write and illustrate an original adventure story! It will be an exciting ride, great for aspiring writers and artists. Featuring George O’Connor (Olympians), Matt London (The 8th Continent), Zack Giallongo (The Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents Macbeth), Frank Cammuso (The Misadventures of Salem Hyde), Scott Campbell (Hug Machine), Ben Hatke (Julia’s House for Lost Creatures).

FIRST SECOND is an imprint of Roaring Brook Press, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, which owns some of America's most prestigious publishers, known for great integrity and literary quality. These include Henry Holt, FSG, St Martin's Press, Tor and Picador, all of which have garnered the most coveted prizes in publishing.